01 A capital without water
Start with the problem. Beijing receives 586 millimetres of precipitation a year, of which 329 fall in July and August. It is a low figure, typical of a dry continental climate, and it is distributed in the worst possible way: almost all at once in two months and almost nothing the rest of the year.
On that basis it was decided, in the thirteenth century, to put the capital of an enormous empire here. And a capital is not just a palace: it is a concentrated population that has to be fed every day of the year, including the months when it does not rain. Food had to come from the south, from the fertile plains of the lower Yangtze, more than a thousand kilometres away.
The question was not how to build the city. It was how to get the grain to it every winter.
02 Thirty-nine kilometres in a year
The Grand Canal already existed and reached Tongzhou, on the outskirts. The last stretch, however, had to be done overland, and that meant unloading, loading onto carts and unloading again every sack of grain, with the cost and slowness that implies at imperial scale.
The solution was signed by Guo Shoujing, engineer and astronomer. His proposal was to dig a branch that would take the boats from Tongzhou into the city itself. Work began in 1292 and the canal, 39 kilometres long, was finished in 1293: one year for a project that changed how the capital was supplied.
The end point of that branch is what we now call Shichahai, the linked lakes lying northwest of the Drum Tower. That is where the boats tied up. That is, the pond crossed today by pedalos was the unloading quay of an empire's capital.
03 The proof is on the bank
If you walk the bank knowing nothing, you see no more than a pleasant urban lake. But there is a stone stele that says it explicitly: it identifies the site as part of the Grand Canal and declares it a protected monument of national importance, dated March 2013. It is small, sits at ground level and most people walk past without looking at it.
It is worth looking for because it changes the mental scale of the walk. Without it, you are in a neighbourhood park. With it, you are at the northern end of a waterway crossing half of China, and what is in front of you is not a lake: it is the zero point of a seven-hundred-year-old logistics system.
04 What remains of all that
Almost nothing of the original use is visible: no quays, no warehouses, no barges. What remains is the shape of the water, which is a great deal more than it sounds. The three lakes are still exactly where they were, with the same perimeter, and the alley neighbourhood around them grew tight against them precisely because this is where the goods arrived.
And a lesson remains that still holds. The city has never solved its water problem by itself: it was placed where there was none and has been bringing it in ever since, first by canal and today through far larger infrastructure. That quiet lake with its willows is the first chapter, and the prettiest, of a story that is not over.
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